Went to a school outside Beipu this weekend. Tons of butterflies, chrysalis and caterpillars. School is 'famous' for its butterflies and even has a greenhouse and loads of information to study and protect them. Pretty cool.

thesublimenakedfairy wrote:Went to a school outside Beipu this weekend. Tons of butterflies, chrysalis and caterpillars. School is 'famous' for its butterflies and even has a greenhouse and loads of information to study and protect them. Pretty cool.

I'm quite concerned about the health of the winged insect population here. I garden without insecticides on a balcony, so each spring, I manually remove caterpillars from my scores of plants. Four or five years ago I was removing 10-20 caterpillars a day. It has been dropping dramatically. Last year it was nearly zero for the whole season. that's a drop of about 1300 to about 6. This year it is zero, absolutely zero, and there are very few butterflies hovering about the plants. Very few bees and wasps too, almost nil. Something is very, very wrong.

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